Gore Vidal (102 page)

As soon as Gore returned to Rome in early May, he sat at his large writing table in the sunlight that came across the terrace from the long Roman skyline and began to write
Myra Breckinridge
. The most immediate specific stimulus was his response to a request from Ken Tynan to write an erotic sketch for a musical sex show, to be called
Oh! Calcutta!
, which Tynan hoped would be theatrically innovative and immensely profitable. Always short of money, Tynan, who had remarried, had recently borrowed £1,000 from Gore. Harold Pinter was “
co-devising and
co-directing,” Tynan explained. “It's to be an erotic evening with no purpose except to titillate, arouse and provoke … the whole thing very elegant and perverse, every heterosexual fetish fully catered for and no crap about art.” By the late 1960s Broadway and even London West End censorship had loosened enough to make the production possible. Tynan invited a dozen writers to write a sketch that would dramatize the writer's favorite erotic interest. “A sketch on the organization of an orgy, for instance, might be attractive,” he wrote to Gore. The sketches would be the basis of a revue that would represent the usual standardized erotic interests. “Generally, he wanted something far out for
Oh! Calcutta
!” Vidal recalled. “Myra'd do business for spanking. After all if she were just dildo wielding….” But as soon as Vidal got going on the sketch, “it got more interesting and I certainly wasn't going to waste it on a review-sketch.” Almost immediately he had left Tynan's request far behind. Into his conscious mind came a sentence, “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess,” as if that were the talismanic combination of words in which was contained the entirety of a novel, few of the details of which he yet knew. Cool and analytical as he could be as a writer, he believed in and gave authority to his unconscious. “It's the conscious mind I don't believe in,” he later seriously quipped. There were some things that were clear to him from the moment he began something not for Tynan but for himself and a larger audience. This would be a comic novel, satiric, parodic, fearless, he hoped, in its imaginative engagement with cultural tropes about gender, sex, politics, literature, and film. His recent reading of the French novelists, both the fiction and the theories, was much on his mind, stimulating within him a self-consciousness about the process of writing so strong that it would be part of the fictional narrative.
Myra
, he quickly decided, would be Myra's own journal, written for publication, and Myra would have some of her creator's awareness of recent trends in writing and theorizing about the novel. He would not be
bound by the conventions of realistic fiction. At certain points in the narrative Myra and her creator would overlap. He could flow into and out of her as he thought desirable; as a character, she would be in the tradition of Moll Flanders, Pamela, Becky Sharp, Isabel Archer, Kate Croy—the powerful feminine figures of the literary past. In regard to the author-character relationship and the usual coordinates of the realistic novel, the model would be Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy.
Myra Breckinridge
would be an “invention,” and though what would come after was not in his mind at the moment, he would later write a series of such novels, from
Myron
, a sequel to
Myra
, to
The Smithsonian Institution
, all of which assumed the imaginative freedom to rearrange the usual coordinates of time, space, and cause and effect. The tonal model would be Jonathan Swift, particularly “A Modest Proposal,” and also
Gulliver's Travels
. As wonderful as the world might be, it was also a hateful world whose depredations could best be evoked in literature with Swiftean “savage indignation,” with no-holds-barred satiric aggressiveness and parodic anger. Gore was himself angry, and very disappointed in what human beings had done and were doing to our planet. His own country was among the most powerfully predatory destroyers. Its puritan tradition devoured people's natural instincts and chances for happiness by rigid, self-serving moralism. Its expansive and self-deluding greed was making dollar materialism more triumphant than ever. In Vietnam we were destroying a semi-helpless people, wasting our own substance, coarsening our national life, dividing America with an intensity that threatened national chaos. And literature seemed to be fading away into either an artifact from the past or the preserve of an elite few.

From the start, as Myra came to life in his imagination, she joined in his mind with the idea for a novel about an academy of modeling and drama. In 1952, in an early draft of
Judgment
, he had had what he had thought a “wildly funny chapter” depicting “a perfect heterosexual marriage between Myra and Myron and they constantly quarrel…. So Myra and Myron entered my head at the time of
Judgment of Paris
and … it was excised from it at Anaïs's request on my behalf, for my own good. Such a serious book, any glint of humor she loathed.” The conversation between scriptwriters that he had heard in 1945 by the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool about
The Sirens of Atlantis
surfaced. Somehow it was to be part of the mix, for the novel would be permeated by film culture and history, from Fay Wray to Maria Montez. Parker Tyler, whom he had met decades before at
Peggy Guggenheim's New York salon, had written a now-out-of-print Freudian study,
The Magic and Myth of the Movies
, which he had on hand to bring in as a semi-parodic presentation of the high culture's intellectualization of Hollywood. Breckinridge itself was a name with two associations, one immediately available from his historical reading, the first and only Vice President of the Confederacy. Years later, when he was sent an obituary of John “Bunny” Breckinridge, who had died at the age of ninety-four, he was prompted to recall another overheard conversation. “I
do
remember—my mother's circle at the Beverly Hills Hotel, they loved talking about our feathered friends, referring to fairies—one might have been Bunny Breckinridge of San Francisco. I was then in the Army. So they could talk fearlessly in front of me since I was no longer a child. I don't remember the sex change at all. I don't think that was discussed. Bunny Breckinridge was a famous queen who had married and gone to prison in that order or, if not in that order, the other way around, and all the ladies had met him, including my mother, and that was all, and then I never thought of him again. I was halfway through
Myra Breckinridge
before I realized that Myra had been a man.”

From new moon in April to new moon in May, he wrote the entire first draft of
Myra Breckinridge
, an imaginative riff more deeply absorbing and fulfilling than any single writing experience he had ever had before. As he wrote, he felt his expressive powers at their height. He was writing from deeper, more spontaneous sources than had readily been reachable in previous attempts. For the first time he was decisively and totally liberated from the narrow realism from which he had started.
Williwaw
was light-years away. The experience was liberating. The restraints he had felt before no longer restricted him. At forty-two, he now had an increased, more sharply formed, perhaps even more courageous commitment to self-expression that took chances both with artistic form and with self-revelation. The change in cultural climate that the sixties had brought had also contributed to making
Myra
possible. The erotic elements seemed appropriate, actually necessary, essential to the thematic challenge in which titillation became the lure with which to implicate readers and make them aware of the damage society had done to our natural selves. Myra (who had once been Myron) was more victim than victimizer. The sex-change operation embodied his/her capability for bisexual roles. But in her tormented expression of sexual and psychological instability, it also disembodied society's self-destructive rules about
sex and gender. Deeply anti-Christian, the novel attacked a civilization that had forced many people to be at lifelong war with themselves. And the individual internal war mirrored the warlike predilections of the society in general, of which Vietnam was but the most recent, though one of the worst examples. So self-distressed and self-destructive was the polity that the best way to capture it in fiction was with this kind of extrarealistic, imaginative explosion into transgressive literary language and aesthetic form. And the appropriate tone that would effectively match the dark vision had to be comic: the comedy of despair, laughter that went beyond tears. The outrageous was aesthetically appropriate, from jokes to darkness.

After finishing the first draft of
Myra
, Gore, with Howard, Joanne, and Paul, sailed out of Piraeus on a hired yacht with four staterooms, for what they expected to be ten days of lovely Adriatic sunshine. The isles of Greece were before them, Rhodes their destination. The four of them had now been friends for over ten years. When she had finished
Judgment of Paris
, Joanne had telegraphed Gore, “
AM AT YOUR FEET
ARTISTWISE SUCH A BEAUTIFUL MIND BETWEEN THOSE FLAPPING EARS.” She regularly remembered to send him birthday greetings. Howard usually sent celebratory greetings to Joanne and Paul, and Howard and Joanne had grown especially fond of one another. But the Edgewater and Los Angeles days of regular companionship were behind them. Inevitably they saw less of the Newmans. In general, their Dutchess County life seemed mostly over, though they still saw and wrote to their friends. “Edgewater,” Fred Dupee wrote to him that July, “is pretty enough to break your heart—yes, even yours—with the willows still shimmering demurely despite all they have seen and heard over the years. I told them you had only gone away for a while and were on the best-seller list and would be back sometime and everything would be
all right
.” But Edgewater seemed more and more in the past. Margaret Shafer and her husband had been spending the year on a sabbatical in Rome. For the first time they got to know her well and found her company lively, an attractive lady whose beauty they enjoyed and whose worship of Gore, Gore enjoyed. The Dupees they always saw on their visits, and Fred's Roman holidays were holidays for them as well, an opportunity for Gore and Fred to talk about books. Dupee still had no equal as a critic in Gore's mind. He rarely saw the Roveres now, though he was usually happy to see them. Clearly,
Gore's high valuation of his Roman life made it inevitable that he would have less frequent and less sustained time with his American friends. “I am getting sentimental in my dotage,” Newman had written to Gore in 1965, that he longed to crack a bottle with him. It had been long, he joked, since he had seen him facedown in a urinal. Whatever direction they were facing, they were usually at a distance from one another.

When they sailed out of Piraeus, they looked forward to a happy holiday together. The external omens, though, were not good. Gore had done all the arranging. “That is not Gore's strong point,” Joanne remarked. It turned out that the crew spoke no English or French. The captain seemed not to know quite what he was doing. Some of the worst storms of the decade, rarely seen in May, kept the seas high and rough. Despite the obstacles, some things went well, and both Paul and Joanne enjoyed Gore's accounts of the relevant mythology and literature, especially on Rhodes. As usual, he delighted in being charmingly tutorial. To the Newmans his knowledge seemed breathtakingly encyclopedic, and they blessed their good fortune in having such a superlative personal guide. But the weather was recalcitrant throughout. As soon as they sailed, Athenian sunshine turned dark over the rising seas. Soon they were sloshing around in wind and water. Gore and Paul played chess and read. Joanne embroidered and read. Howard nervously watched waves and crew. The captain, alas, seemed uncertain. “We got on ship and we took off … and ran right into another boat,” Joanne recalled. “Instantly. This was the first thing we did. And then I discovered … that this was the first time that the skipper had ever skipped, as it were.” But Gore felt he had reason to believe that the Greek captain was an old salt. To deal with the storm that first night the captain shut off the engine. It made matters worse. In the dark, he anchored in a bay off an island, probably afraid to bring the boat in. In the morning, hungry, they wanted to eat. Apparently, though, there was no food aboard. And “nothing on the boat worked,” as Paul quickly noticed. “The motorboat wouldn't work. We went into the island in a three-man dinghy … looking for food, since the skipper wouldn't sail out because of the weather. We bought bread and cheese and vegetables and had all these groceries in bags. Howard stepped onto the outside gunnel as we were getting into the boat. We all went immediately overboard. By this time the word had spread on the island that some American movie stars were on board, so I surfaced to the polite applause of certain onlookers. The food was gone. Everything.”

When the weather briefly became calm, they sailed on. After a number of island stops in just-bearable weather, they were detained by the Greek Navy. The skipper had sailed into a sensitive military area. There had recently been a military coup. Greece was under martial law. “The Greek Navy fired a cannon at us and stopped us. We had to follow the Navy ship out away from that island and to another island. I thought Gore was asleep. Once they started firing at us, I said to Joanne, ‘Jesus, get downstairs! Lock yourself in the bathroom.' I thought it might be guys from the other end of the political spectrum who might want hostages or might want the boat.” Gore came up on deck. He seemed perfectly calm about what was transpiring. “It never occurred to Gore,” Joanne surmised, “that anything would happen to him, especially in that day and age. How dare it! We were so young. He was perfectly happy and went back downstairs and back to his book. Howard and I were sitting clutching each other, saying ‘Oh, God!'” Soon a stocky captain came on board. Newman, who had been in the Navy during World War II, did not like the look of it. “The captain had some guys with machine guns with him. I like mature guys if they're holding machine guns. These were young kids who stood with their guns ready on each side of the rear gunnel. They demanded to see our passports. They looked at them and us very suspiciously. Perhaps they thought we were political activists looking to create an incident. The Navy captain, after looking at all the papers we had and reading them slowly, finally grabbed the document I had from the American embassy stating who I was. I had lost my passport. On the day we were leaving Athens, we ran to the American embassy, which issued a temporary visa saying, This is Paul Newman, the actor. The captain kept reading it over and over. Then he stopped abruptly, looked around, and saw me. He looked at me for what seemed a long time. He put the document down and seemed to think for a moment. Then he went to the two machine-gunners and said, ‘Off!' We surmised that he realized that we were American movie stars and that he didn't want an international incident. That got us off the hook, just barely.” Actually, Gore soon told Fred Dupee, “
the only real diversion
” on the entire trip “was when an idiot captain brought us too close to the island where 10,000 political prisoners are kept and we were fired upon and boarded by the Greek navy. Fortunately the face of the international film favorite saved us from arrest as potential Pimpernels.” By this time Joanne had had enough. She was getting “grumpier and grumpier,” especially when
the steward didn't close a porthole and the rain soaked one of her favorite dresses. Feeling a little claustrophobic below, she decided to spend some time on deck, despite the weather. “As I was sitting on a trunk, a wave hit us broadside, the whole ship went that way, and the trunk with me on it came careening down and hit the side of the deck. I almost went overboard. At that point I was—Ahhhh! ‘Get me out of here! I'm going to drown! My children are going to be orphans! Ay, ay, ay!' I was really getting hysterical. Paul said, ‘Wait a minute, wait, wait! We'll get into someplace.' So we convinced the skipper that we had to go into the lee of some island nearby.” But she had had enough. She was quietly emphatic in her most ladylike way: “Get me off this fucking boat!” When a ferry on its way to Piraeus came by, she jumped ship. Happy to be back in Athens, she had some delightful days there on her own and then flew to London. The three men finished their island tour. Howard and Gore returned to Rome, the Newmans, via Rome, to sunny California. “
Greece was depressing
,” Gore wrote to his father, “bad weather, worse politics. The Newmans just left. Finishing a new novel and waiting for war. Not a pleasant time.”